You can cook food worthy of five-star restaurants, even if you’re the most inexperienced cook. You just need to throw a bit of money at your kitchen. It will be wasteful. It will be expensive as hell. But it will taste incredible. I know this because I tried it. I lived the Modernist Cuisine lifestyle.

If you’re searching for abortion care, be careful using Google Maps—you might end up at a crisis pregnancy center instead of a legit clinic. These facilities, where staff pressures clients to “choose life,” have been gaming results at the local level using keywords and the maps function. Gizmodo and Damn Joan have…

It was on a friend’s floor that Clairissa Mulloy found the laser disc she wore tied above her head like a charming sunhat—better than a CD; “More coverage,” she explained. And looking out over those dancers from an upper balcony, Nisey Shanks fluttered her eyelashes so they glowed blue—the deep cobalt of a screen with…

When footage of CBS’s 1967 coverage of Super Bowl I first emerged from the ashes seven years ago, sports historians reacted with glee. Long considered one of the Holy Grails of sportscasting history, the footage, found on a set of two-inch Quadruplex video tapes in a dusty Pennsylvania attic, provided a rare glimpse…

When Apple launched the MacBook Air at the end of January 2008, it was an overpriced marvel of design and tech. The laptop, a silvery sliver of machined aluminum, was .76 inches at its thickest and weighed less than three pounds. In an impractical but effective on-stage demonstration, Steve Jobs unveiled the the…

The first bitcoin transaction ever was by man who bought two pizzas. That arrangement would be worth over a $100 million today. Regret was baked into Bitcoin from the beginning. Last year, somewhat inexplicably, Bitcoin’s price rose more than 1,000 percent. That number has since dipped, but a single bitcoin is still,…

Let’s say your house is on fire, or overrun by a gang of psychotic raccoons. You don’t hesitate—you take out your phone, and you call the fire department, or animal control, and then firemen/raccoon-wranglers are promptly dispatched to your home. These are well-established protocols, essential to the maintenance of a…

On January 19th, 2017, the Plasco building, a 17-story steel high-rise in Tehran, caught fire. The blaze began on one of the building’s upper floors and then spread quickly through the tower’s sprinkler-less garment workshops. As the Tehran fire department battled the nearly unreachable fire, the steel skyscraper …

Looking ahead to 2018, there’s plenty to be excited about when it comes to design. From technology companies who are finally starting to own their responsibility, to the rest of us saying goodbye to boring hardware—here are five design trends we’d like to see more of this year.

Earth might be looking a little worse for wear, after the last four-hundred years of reckless wide-scale resource extraction, but to its credit it hasn’t collapsed entirely. Despite our best efforts, it continues to gamely welcome our rapidly expanding population, barring the occasional earthquake. Whether the planet…

What a year, huh? While Facebook snooped on your family secrets, Trump tweeted us deeper into disaster, and various foreign objects were being pulled out of unsuspecting people’s heads, there was some joyous things to behold too. Like a hand-squeezed Juicero bag, or a flat Earther trying to go to space to prove a…

As the year draws to a close, we’re not going to pretend that 2017 is going to be fondly remembered by everyone around the country. But instead of taking the easy route and simply pretending that 2017 never happened, let’s instead focus on the fact that lots of awesome people did some really amazing things this year.

For years, Uber systemically scraped data from competing ride-hailing companies all over the world, harvesting information about their technology, drivers, and executives. Uber gathered information from these firms using automated collection systems that ran constantly, amassing millions of records, and sometimes…

UTQIAĠVIK, ALASKA—On a crumbling heap of thousand-year-old garbage overlooking a leaden sea, Anne Jensen shakes her head disapprovingly. A gust of Arctic air whips her hair around her face as she scrutinizes the beige house perched sixty feet above us, atop an Iñupiat archaeological site that’s fast eroding into the…

Silicon Valley had somewhat of a reckoning this year. The tech overlords finally had to face the music: their products and services aren’t as wholesome and life-changing as they preached them to be. Turns out, a bunch of white men didn’t anticipate issues that might impact their non-white-male users. Like sexual…

You did it. You waited out all the announcements back in the spring during Mobile World Congress and the deluge of new handsets that debuted this fall. But now, after upstarts such as Essential have had a chance to shine and giants like Apple and Samsung are done plying their latest wares, there’s a big question worth…